What is your most desired result of Reality Hunger?
My most desired result is that it will change forever how we think about genre and copyright and the vertiginousness of existence.
Knee-Jerk Talks to David Shields About Reality Hunger
What ultimately inspired you to write Reality Hunger? And who was your intended audience?
I wanted to explain to myself why I can’t read or write fiction anymore. Intended audience: everyone who reads books.
Why did you choose to write it in the form of a manifesto (as opposed to, say, a collection of essays or memoir)?
It’s just the way the book came out. I’m not sure how to explain it beyond that.
In the book you admit that much of the text is taken directly (usually unattributed) from many other writers, and you even include a chapter on copyright laws in America. What sort of copyright issues did you encounter in the process of putting the book together?
I’d hoped to run no citations, but I lost that argument with Random House legal. See the book’s appendix for an explanation. See also my discussion of this with Siva Vaidhyanathan on bloggingheads.tv.
What is your most desired result of Reality Hunger?
My most desired result is that it will change forever how we think about genre and copyright and the vertiginousness of existence.
What is your next/current project?
I’m co-editing an anthology of essays called Death: Contemporary Writers Confront the Inevitable; Norton is publishing it in 2011. I’m adapting three of my books into film
“treatments.” I’m also working on two other book projects as well, neither of which I can talk about right now.
Getting to Know David Shields
What are you reading right now?
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets [Wave Books, Oct. 2009]—quite great.
What is a book that makes you very angry, even to think about its existence?
Knee-Jerk, volumes ii through viii.
What is a book everyone should be embarrassed not to have read?
In Search of Lost Time.
What career path would you be most interested in pursuing if you were not a writer and teacher?
A self-reflective documentary filmmaker.
What is an album or musical artist you listen to when no one else is around?
Pachelbel’s Canon.
Would you rather be able to breathe under water or fly in the air? Why?
Fly in the air; pretty sure I can already breathe under water.
What is a favorite place you’ve never visited?
Niagara Falls.
Who is a favorite living person you’ve never met?
J.M. Coetzee.
What makes you cry most easily? If nothing, what do you wish made you cry?
Bad movies; life.
How many times have you met James Frey?
Zero.
How often do people ask you about James Frey?
Occasionally.
What do you think James Frey’s next book will be about?
A biography of Oprah.
Early Praise for David Shield's Reality Hunger:
“I’ve just finished reading Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and I’m lit up by it—astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. It’s a pane that’s also a mirror: as a result of reading it, I can’t stop looking into myself and interrogating my own artistic intentions. It will be published to wild fanfare, because it really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“Reality Hunger is a manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a ‘Make It New’ for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions, particularly those that define the well-made novel. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both familiar and unfamiliar, David Shields takes us on an engaging and often exhilarating intellectual journey. I enjoyed Reality Hunger immensely and found myself cheering Shields on. I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) ‘a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking.’ I, too, like novels that don’t look like novels.”
—J.M. Coetzee
